


Chocolate and Selegiline

by stilinskisoul



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cyborg Derek, Light Angst, M/M, Sci-Fi, Scientist Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 14:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4482368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilinskisoul/pseuds/stilinskisoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has to give away his precious cyborg he built. He has one last night with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chocolate and Selegiline

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://40.media.tumblr.com/ecf16d14e9cf042b34b5947ef2a4e8e0/tumblr_n33tgxIPmc1rr3bbao1_1280.jpg) picture.
> 
> Unbeta'd. Enjoy!

The transparent blue screen was the only thing that gave away any light in the darkness of the room. It looked like it was levitating in the air, and it showed many buttons and even more little screens with diagrams depicted in them. One was a heart monitor, informing the young guy in front of it about the other man’s heartbeat. The touchscreen dimly lit the defined lines of the boy’s face, casting his amber eyes in a tint of electric blue.

There were tons of cables sneaking towards the man, sitting on the opposite side of the screen, facing the boy. His heart was pumping the blood through his veins steadily, in a slow rhythm – each contraction of that heavy bundle of muscles was signed by a dull _beep_. It was also the only sound in the entire room.

His goggles were hanging in his neck; he had failed to take them off ever since he finished welding the cold metal parts of the other man a while ago. His white gown was also spread on his shoulders – it was always chilly in the lab, which was because the artificial tissues required lower temperature.

He looked up at the cyborg he built a long time ago. His eyes skimmed through the sharp cheekbones, the five o’clock shadow covering that jawline he was insanely attracted to, the long jungle of unmoving eyelashes – according to the EEG, the cyborg was in the third stage of sleep, the deepest slumber of all. Soon he would be experiencing the wonders of the realm of dreams.

In front of the cyborg’s mouth was a glass mask, which dampened in regular intervals as a sign of the humanoid breathing still.

“I will have to leave you soon,” whispered the scientist, then tore his eyes away from the man. He hated himself for building this cyborg so perfect. He hated himself for unconsciously building the _perfect significant other_ for himself. He hated the solitude that had been accompanying him for his entire life, because if it wasn’t for the loneliness, he wouldn’t have had a hardship now letting go of what he’d created.

He shook his head, resigning, then touched a few buttons on the screen. He increased the amount of leptin and melatonin hormones in the cyborg’s system – he did have human parts, but he needed artificial hormones to function his human half properly.

The whole of his humanity was the result of the scientist’s restless work – he’d made the tissues, and printed them with a three dimensional printer, he’d put them together, he’d created the bones, then had stuck the muscles on them. It had taken too much time, and too many emotions.

Especially emotions.

Due to the artificial intelligence, the cyborg had a basic knowledge, so he had been aware of courtesy, words, and he could write and read from the beginning, but some things had to be taught. The young scientist had spent hours talking to the humanoid about subatomic particles, and how they are constantly crossing through their bodies, each second, because somewhere in space, loads of lightyears away, a star had exploded, creating a supernova, and its particles had flown to the Earth. He even showed those particles to the cyborg via dry ice – it was a mesmerising experience to see how haphazard lines of white dust were crossing through the dark air in the jar, lit only by a flashlight. The humanoid wanted to be able to see them with his eyes, too, so the boy then figured out how to minimize this trick and build it into the humanoid’s pale hazel eyes.

He had shown his cyborg a trick with purified water, too – after taking it out of the freezer, he had smacked it, which caused an instant freeze. He had then asked the cyborg to hold his hand up, then started pouring water on the ice in the humanoid’s palm. A column of ice had been literally poured onto his hand, which also fascinated him.

They had gone to stargazing, and also attended a black-tie event – the boy wanted everyone to acknowledge that a non-human organism can be taught how to behave properly among actual humans.

His cyborg was the first to have ever been built.

The scientist let out a shaky breath, then rubbed the heel of his palms into his eyes, partially to get rid of the sleepiness, and partially to get rid of the morsels of tears. He loved his humanoid too much.

And now he had to give it away, because others wanted to experiment with it, too.

“That’s not ‘it’, but ‘ _he_ ’,” he muttered under his breath, then pushed himself away from the screen aggressively with a frustrated jerk of his legs after having turned the panel off. The goggles bounced on his chest. He let himself give a once-over to his man – his calm, sleeping face, which had never reflected a real emotion, his tousled hair that had the colour of a raven’s feather, his sculpted body and the metal parts, which included his right arm from his biceps down, a quarter of his side, where some of the cables were attached, and his left leg. This was his significant other.

It all was right in front of him, in a physical form, yet it wasn’t real.

It wasn’t real, because his man was made only of artificial ingredients. Nothing was purely natural in him, he was just a creation of plastic, something mimicking the human body. Even the insane colour of his eyes and his adorably attractive bunny teeth were the scientist’s doings, not nature’s. The cyborg lacked emotions, too. He was a sociopath, who had enough common sense to tell apart right from wrong – but this skill could also be etched up to the built-in artificial intelligence in him.

He had a beautiful, curious mind, which was also fake.

The scientist forcefully closed his eyes, shook his head as though attempting to get rid of the memory of what he’d just seen, then turned around and started walking away, out of the lab. He wanted to be as far away from here as possible, otherwise parting ways would hurt him even more. At the door, he stopped, only to whisper, “Goodbye, Derek”.

“Stiles,” rasped the cyborg through the respiratory mask in front of his nose and mouth, just as Stiles stepped out with a leg. His heart twisted painfully in his chest as he risked a peek at Derek over his shoulder. The man slowly moved his hand to reach for the mask and take it away from his face. The thick cable attached to its chin moved with it, too, and it ended up resting against Derek’s muscled, rock hard chest.

“When did you wake up?” asked Stiles as he whipped around. He knew that even though Derek had no emotions, he was master of pinpointing what others were feeling, so Stiles had to be wary of his actions. He did his best to force his voice into light easiness and morph his expression into something nonchalant or remotely tired. When he looked at Derek’s face again, he knew he failed miserably.

“Stiles-” Derek said again, but was cut off by the other.

“I’ll increase the amount of melatonin for you, so you’ll be able to fall back asleep,” he said, already activating the screen. Derek shook his head.

“I don’t want to sleep,” he said sternly, which threw Stiles for a loop. He couldn’t help the shocked look he directed at Derek immediately. The humanoid was looking at him with an expression of remorse, pity, sadness, grief and agony as though he was experiencing physical pain at the moment.

“Are you in pain?” asked Stiles. His gut instincts were yelling at him that something was odd, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly. Instead of trying to wrap his head around that, he did his best to avoid Derek’s speech, which the man looked really eager to share. However, Stiles didn’t want to hear it, not when they hardly had any time left with each other. “I’ll give you 3 milligrams of procaine, how does that sound?” he asked, but both of them knew it was a rhetorical question.

Derek didn’t even bother to answer that, instead went in straight for the kill.

“Are you leaving me?”

Stiles’ heart momentarily stopped beating. He swallowed a few times, because his throat suddenly went severely dry. He forced a smile on his lips.

“Not my choice,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “And technically, _you’re_ leaving _me_ ,” he added, deciding to go for jokes.

Derek frowned, and his lips turned into a tight thin line as the squeezed them together. He stood on shaky legs; his machine half still needed to be charged in order to function accordingly. Since it was only on 12%, his human half had to hold up and carry the whole of his body, including the heavy metals.

“Hey, stop that,” Stiles cried out when he saw Derek was in the process of unplugging the cables from his body. He instinctively ran to Derek to grab the wires and to insert them back to their place, but Derek refused. He grabbed Stiles’ wrists and held them until the boy stopped trashing in his iron grip.

“Look at me,” he ordered in a low, commanding voice, which wasn’t common for him, it surprising Stiles yet again. He couldn’t help, but oblige. “Look me in the eye, and tell me I have to leave you.”

Stiles closed his eyes, then averted his gaze.

“Not like it means anything to you,” he said, accompanied by a shrug. “Leaving me won’t be hard for you. You don’t have any feelings, so you will only have to get used to the new-”

“Why do you think it will be no hardship for me?” interjected Derek impatiently.

“I don’t think it requires too much explanation,” answered Stiles, jerking his shoulders up again. “You don’t have the hormones to experience any emotions, you can only _recognize_ what people feel, because you’re smart enough to do that due to that artificial intelligence of yours. You also know how to _express_ emotions; you smile and you frown, but they are never real, because there is no real feeling behind them,” he said, then added, “You will see how easy it will be for you to adapt to the new environment there.”

Derek was eyeing him intently with an intense gaze, as though waiting for Stiles to look at him, but it didn’t happen.

“What makes you think I don’t have any emotions?”

“Because you don’t, okay?” exclaimed Stiles, his loud voice a vividly sharp contrast to Derek’s collected, calm tone. He went on. “Because you don’t have any of the hormones regulating your emotions, only the inevitable ones to function your body like a human’s!”

“What about my brain?” Stiles arched an eyebrow at him in a mute question.

“What would be with your brain? That has nothing to do with-”

“What about my _memories_?” asked Derek.

“I don’t know, what about them?” Stiles returned the question, frustration taking over.

“I do have memories from back when you first flooded my circulatory system with hormones. I don’t think you know about it, but you injected a tiny amount of phenylethylamine into me, too. It wasn’t even one milligram, which is probably the reason you’re unaware of it, but it was enough for you to be imprinted into my brain forever. Then you took me everywhere, and you showed and taught me everything. I _depend_ on you. Even though I don’t have any hormones in me at the moment apart from the minimum amount of adrenaline and noradrenaline that you always make sure are present in me, I know I would constantly feel a hole in my chest if you weren’t there. I think about it, imagine it, and then some kind of… _uneasiness_ kicks in,” he admitted, his fingers brushing against the racing pulse in Stiles’ wrist. He looked straight into Stiles’ eyes. “I don’t want that.”

“But…” Stiles mumbled, his mind running a mile minute to try and rationalize what had just been said. “Probably your brain learned that I’m…” he had to swallow again. “That I’m _important_ to you?”

“That’s what I think, too,” nodded Derek curtly. His fingers slowly unwrapped from around Stiles’ wrists, but he didn’t take a step back, neither did Stiles.

“It’s like you’re feeling something _without_ emotions,” said the boy, “which just doesn’t make sense. That’s impossible.”

“No. _You_ told me that when it comes to people and their minds, _nothing_ is impossible, because the human brain is one of the greatest mysteries in nature besides time, which you said to be the most subjective thing in the universe.” Derek said slowly, quietly. His tone didn’t carry any feelings with it, making his speech sound nonchalant, like one of those coming from a GPS. He added in a barely-there tone, “Just _think_ about it. Don’t deny happiness from yourself.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title was probably puzzling for most of you, so let me explain why I opted to give this to my work. (It's symbolic, obviously. I'm literally _physically_ unable to leave out any form of symbolism from any of my writings.) So here's the explanation:
> 
> Did you know that the myth about chocolate making you happy is a hoax? It does contain phenylethylamine, a hormone to make you happy, but an enzyme called MAO-B (monoamine-oxidase) is going to tear it down before it reaches your brain. This is why you need to take MAO-B inhibitors (MAOI), for instance selegiline, to prevent it and thus, actually get happy due to chocolate.
> 
> Now it's up to you how you interpret the title according to what you read.
> 
> I hope you liked it :)


End file.
